There is no mainstream in New Zealand poetry. Under
scrutiny, the critical categories proposed from time to
time break down into ever smaller categories, whose number
almost corresponds with the number of poets. The
approaches I have found most useful, rather than offer a
guided tour of a hastily-erected artificial structure
called 'New Zealand poetry', respond to the writing itself
by describing some ways of reading it. I would like to
look at the work of six writing interesting poetry: five
who published books in 1991, and Allen Curnow.

◊

Curnow has been a presence to be reckoned with in any
discussion of contemporary New Zealand poetry for more
than fifty years. His is an extraordinarily complex,
individual poetry that resists easy description. It has
always combined a broadly philosophical and theological
frame of mind with observation of the physical world and
an acute consciousness of the slipperiness of language:

I write. Those writings which we now
identify
doubtfully as such yield nothing. I transcribe
tapes of the period recovered from pack-ice,

Curnow has always seemed confident in the role of poet as
spokesman for (high) culture — with Curnow it's a kind of
self-ordained, strangely secular priesthood of poetry.
Earlier this led to an active, public role, both as poet
and anthologist, in shaping ideas of a realist,
'responsible' New Zealand poetry — and ideas of New
Zealand.2 Later Curnow's
confrontation with phenomena, with time and place, with
history, with language, took a less public, less universal
tone, but the general concerns remained, and found a
greater range of forms. Curnow's poetry now is a flexible,
fresh vehicle for a less anxious, less combative, and
often eschatological conversation with his own past —
especially his childhood:

To someone of my generation, the most striking
characteristic of Curnow as poet is the sense of tradition
and vocation intertwined. He has always been a
'professional', working away assimilating the ideas and
practice of 'the tradition' (Ezra Pound, William Carlos
Williams, WB Yeats, especially, from this century) and
forging a 'New Zealand poetry' tradition of his own; he is
a professor, always professing (in the word's sense of
'declaring publicly'), even if what he has to profess is
usually doubt. His poetry has a ceremonial or rhetorical
tone, even if personal recollection is its starting point.
In his later poems he has come down off the stage, but the
reader's implied position is still at his feet. His every
new poem is admirable, a consummate performance, but even
his casualness and wordplay seem somehow studied, and the
reader is always kept at a certain distance:

Blood sample of Peter Monro, where do I
come in? The book doesn't say. Might as well ask

this heart-murmur I've got, how
Edinburgh rock
chipped like a golf-ball cleared Arthur's Seat the day
after Waterloo, first bounce Van Diemen's Land . . .

('A Scrap-Book')4

To be a little simplistic about it, Curnow seems always
to be working, where others have found the freedom to be
playful; he insists on 'the tradition', where others see
many traditions; he is rhetorical, where others are
intimate; his poems are deliberate, made, where others'
are fortuitous, found.

◊

Where Curnow observes slippages in the language —
alternative meanings, the arbitrariness of the words we
use — these are pressed into service; a scepticism about
the ability of language to refer to a reality beyond
language flavours and gives voice to other philosophic
scepticisms. In the poetry of Bill Manhire, by contrast,
language is observed at play rather than put to work. The
poem's urge to say something is typically mocked — gently,
bemusedly, enigmatically and sometimes bleakly or
poignantly — by the way language misbehaves, plays up.
These lines are from 'Hirohito' a long poem in Milky
Way Bar (Victoria University Press, Wellington and
Carcanet, Manchester, 1991):

I am writing my book about him,A Modest History of the Wind,
but I am in difficulty:

chapter after chapter
is being blown away.

Manhire has a keen eye for exhausted and repetitious
phrases and situations, which he juxtaposes in surprising
ways and sometimes turns inside out. Figurative language
is made literal, and the literal built into structures
tantalisingly suggestive of allegory. Like Curnow, Manhire
is concerned with uncertainties — in the world and in
language — but instead of taking as the subject of his
poems uncertainty itself, he wittily takes advantage of
the possibilities that exist when we are uncertain about
something. The poet operates not as creator but as
re-creator; the poems are his recreation, where he
entertains possibilities, while entertaining the reader.
In 'Synopsis (Handel's Imeneo)', for example, confusing
plot summaries of opera and soap-opera are mixed together:

But this is not Toronto, why have the
pirates
entered our conversation? Are they trying
to restore romance or do they want

to leave us in confusion? Any one of us
might be the father of Stephanie's baby.

The best person to read on the subject of Bill Manhire's
poetry is Bill Manhire. An essay published in 1987, which
offers several interesting ways into his poetry, is about
the connections between New Zealand and American poetry.5 Since the 1960s, the major poetic
influences on emerging New Zealand poets have been
American. Manhire points to the huge range of options that
American poetic practice suggested for him as a young poet
in the Sixties and Seventies: 'Poetry could quite properly
be an instrument for subjective exploration, yet this
subjectivity was not necessarily the same thing as
narcissism or solipsism; it might even be a means to a
truly public voice. And poetry could be messy,
contradictory, various, inclusive. It could also be
conversational in its voice, not measured and managed like
a newspaper editorial.' Many of these avenues are being
explored by four poets who emerged in the 1980s and who
each published a new book of poems in 1991 — Gregory
O'Brien, Michele Leggott, Dinah Hawken and Jenny Bornholdt6 — which suggests that what applied
to Manhire and his contemporaries is even more applicable
today: 'I don't believe that American poetry made the
poets of my generation into clones . . . What it did do
was make diversity and possibility available, and in doing
so it freed New Zealand poetry from the single line
represented by the English tradition. . . . A literary
tradition was something you might construct for yourself .
. .'

◊

Gregory O'Brien has constructed his own tradition from an
unusual range of sources: visual, musical and religious as
well as literary. Mark Williams mentions 'Thomas Merton
and Kenneth Patchen, Blues music and surrealism, [C K]
Stead and Manhire'.7 What he takes
from these sources into his own very distinctive poetry
seems to be their attitude to the world and particular
qualities of voice — sometimes exalted, sometimes
plangent, often incantatory — rather than specifically
poetic echoes. His poetry, full of paradoxes, is
constantly surprising, as it conflates the abstract and
the concrete, the quotidian and the mysterious, and
subverts our expectations of syntax. Here is the beginning
of 'Cosmos and Damian', from O'Brien's latest book Great
Lake (Local Consumption, Sydney, 1991):

Talking to no one, the conversation
lasts all day.
In the absence of leaves, to lose someone. Seeking
the gift of tears, I drink from this flask of

rooftops, hedges, the abbey in rain. If
it were
that easy. And I, an unreliable man in a storm.
A machine of flowers rolls across the hills . . .

O'Brien's Roman Catholic background and his parallel
career as a painter and illustrator are relevant to an
understanding of his poetry, which (like his painting) can
be simultaneously symbolic and iconic; language invested
with public and private meanings is used beside language
used apparently 'plainly', to construct tableaux which
function as icons, as pictures of the inexplicable:

Georgia

Her previous body shivers
beside the bed a feather

lands on her thigh a faint
bruise manoeuvres around

her previous body toitois
buffet the window insects

polish sides of the house
a man's hat slips from her

head descends her back
embroidering a short life

of Georgia there.

O'Brien's attempt to capture the fantastic or the
miraculous — the impossible erupting into the possible —
sometimes ends in whimsy. And we may not draw the meanings
the poet has invested in his work; the extent of private
reference, and the reliance on supposedly evocative words,
can lead to a kind of wilful obscurity. It is as if the
tradition O'Brien is constructing for himself has come to
include his own earlier work.8 This
isn't necessarily a bad thing, however, it's just that
such poetry, which is so unmistakeably the work of its
author, asks that you read it a particular way, that you
go along with it. The rewards are many if you're prepared
to take the trip: O'Brien's poems project images in a
highly inventive way. They tap a rich vein of humour that
recalls the tall stories of Irish writer Flann O'Brien (no
relation); their strategy could be described as
'entertaining impossibilities'. And sometime they shine
with a brilliance unique in New Zealand poetry:

Alone, among such things as
he loved — the beautiful ride
away from beauty, for instance

how the song enters the room
before the singer at evensong.
Alone among each of them:

the white of peacocks far from their
blue nests
these cold waters to heal him

of coldness clouds to
absolve him
of clouds. . . .

('Anna Akhmatova's First Husband')

◊

Michele Leggott could also be said to have 'chosen her
own tradition'; hers seems closer than most to the kinds
of American poetry that were being picked up by young New
Zealand poets in the 1970s, and to the work that some of
the latter were publishing. It is a line — or rather a
colloquy — of influences that goes back to William Carlos
Williams, and to Louis Zukofsky, whose work Leggott has
studied in depth. In broad terms, this kind of poetry
explores the power of language to enact experience, rather
than to formulate abstractions from experience. Leggott's
poetry is a torrent of sounds, sentiments, situations and
sensory detail; hers is the most colourful poetry being
written in New Zealand. Mark Williams said of her earlier
work: 'Leggott is a sensualist of the word. Her poems
enact sound, colour, taste, smell, movement.'9 The title of her second book, Swimmers,
Dancers (Auckland University Press, 1991) captures
her poetry's sense of movement; Elizabeth Caffin's comment
on Leggott's first book, Like This? (Auckland
University Press, 1991) is equally true of her second:
'Words themselves give a pleasure of the senses —
repeating, varying, patterning sounds and stresses — but
also suggest others.'10

Like many books of New Zealand poetry, but more so than
most, Swimmers, Dancers is a kind of family album;
it even reproduces some family photographs. Many of the
poems are about motherhood, the 'sensual and miraculous
world of mother and child'. Their long, confident,
energetic lines flow on without punctuation; the reader
must devise a score for the words, and the process of
doing so seems to lend some words more charge than
conventional sentences might allow them. This is the first
stanza of 'Reading Zukofsky's 80 Flowers', a longish poem
which shares the title of Leggott's book on Zukofsky:

lavenders blue
roll your eleven weeks onto summer's late belly and look
out
at the world with your black olive eyes
this was promised under the apple tree at Christmas
when you swam in deep pools of picture space nine days out
among the dream polaroids jacaranda diamante
simulacra of before and after
the visceral rub of pohutukawa in bloom
good established labour the sun going down the Carmel
geese
shrieking and flocking the big movie of us coming apart
then
waterboatmen on the lake at dawn
and we began the long haul from Recovery nine floors up
to Tranquility a sea a somer-seson

Leggott is 'swimming, dancing' in language, and it's
quite a performance. I enjoy her poetry's music and
colour, its lack of restraint, its inclusiveness and
generosity, its openness to the poet's experiences. But
despite its self-conscious asides to the reader, and its
awareness of its own artifice, neither the presence of the
reader nor the referentiality of language are really made
complex. The reader is invited to witness the performance,
and is acknowledged ('close readers what will they find
here . . .' — 'Deluge in a Paper Cup'), but the poet is
always assumed to be in control. And language is always
'under control'; these poems are immensely playful, and do
offer choices to the reader, but language is played
with, and doesn't really play up — the
ability of words to become opaque, to resist their
intended uses, is not really a concern for these poems.
While I doubt they were intended to do anything of the
sort, two lines from a poem called 'Colloquy' sum up for
me the way Leggott's poems operate, on their wide pages:

what about a big table in a room with
windows
looking over the wild and wavy event?

◊

Most of Dinah Hawken's first book, It Has No Sound
And Is Blue (Victoria University Press, Wellington,
1987) was written during a three-year stay in New York. On
the back cover of the book Hawken says: 'New York is a
place that thrives on tensions and extremes, and I am a
person preoccupied with connections and balance. No wonder
we had a difficult, fruitful relationship.' The poems in
the book are often concerned with the struggle for
spiritual wholeness, which seems to be made both more
difficult and more necessary by the 'climate' — both human
and physical — of New York:

When you come down to it we have nothing
much.
Just our bodies. And while they continue to rust
and shudder living in them all of a piece

is the sought-for arrangement, one
that every so often we become — with unearthly
perceptions — with hair's breadth composure.

('Traces of Hope')

Hawken's second book, Small Stories of Devotion
(Victoria University Press, 1991) is mostly composed of
short prose poems — 'small stories.' In contrast to the
earlier poems, these tiny narratives read as attempts to
communicate directly a sense of wholeness, rather than
discuss the necessity and difficulty of achieving it. They
are preceded by an introductory section which is arresting
in its immediacy and its statement of direction:

I'll stop shuffling under my New Zealand
cool, I'll come out
and tell the stories in an eager child-like way, not
because
she's a woman but because she wants me to talk simply and
to reach you.
If I reach you, she says, she'll probably want to touch
you.

The use of first and third persons, the 'I' that is the
poet and the 'she' whose stories are told (who may or may
not be Dinah Hawken) enables considerable play — in the
sense of 'freedom of movement' — in the stories that
follow. The stated intention to 'tell the stories in an
eager child-like way,' to 'talk simply,' will inevitably
be subverted by this gap, and by the poetry's acute
awareness of language's ability simultaneously to enable
and to hinder communication, to convey and withhold
meaning at the same time. This is the way riddles work,
and the stories read like riddles; many are actually
retellings of dreams, as the second introductory stanza
explains:

I did think of using a new language but
above
all (though certainly not forever) she is asking to be
under
stood so I'm settling for the premise that the unconscious
is fresher and less contaminated by history than history.
In other words I'm bound to tell you her dreams.

As we read, however, the distinction between dream and
fiction becomes blurred — it becomes impossible to know
whether each 'small story' has been found in dreams or
simply made up. The reader is forced to surrender any
desire for 'truth', and enter the unrestrained,
irrational, playful world of dreams, of 'unearthly
perceptions', where Hawken has scope to explore a wide
range of emotions — love, desire, fear, anxiety, joy,
melancholy — and to mock, or speak up against, the
restraint typical of many New Zealanders (our 'New Zealand
cool'): 'Where is their restraint, where is their
containment?' becomes a refrain.

The way the poems 'wobble' — between 'I' and 'she',
between dream and fiction — aided by Hawken's deadpan
tone, also makes for some very funny poems. Often the
humour lurks just below the surface, just behind the
straight face the poems pull:

A few nights earlier she and Jung are in
a huge bed together
caressing each other's right forearms. He in his eighties:
she in her thirties. I won't make love to you, he says,
unless I can be sure of your respect and commitment.

('She and Jung')

She goes bleak and blank and balmy. She
says bloody hell and then goodbye.

('The Return')

In Hawken's poetry the reader is often addressed
directly, enlisted in the tricky task of making sense, but
the reader is also repeatedly questioned, and the meaning
of 'you' shifts around; as in Bill Manhire's poems, and
Jenny Bornholdt's, the relationship is always a complex
one. Nevertheless, a kind of intimacy is set up, and
reinforced by the personal nature of the dreams told — and
the jokes shared. This is poet as ordinary person —
fallible, sometimes confused, losing and regaining that
'hair's breadth composure' with which to live 'all of a
piece'. We've come a long way from the thin air of Allen
Curnow's poetry.

◊

Like Dinah Hawken's, Jenny Bornholdt's poetry is casual,
conversational, self-conscious, sometimes laconic.
Hawken's focus, however, is more internal, more concerned
with the psyche; Bornholdt's poems look outward. They are
preoccupied with perception; they are highly observant,
busy trying to apprehend the world and watching others
attempt to do the same. But they are suspicious of grand
themes, of generalisations. The poems work on a small
scale, wryly scrutinising details — of objects, of
landscapes, of our daily negotiations with the world — for
the ironies they might yield, for the possibilities they
contain, for the humour they might inadvertently create.

Bornholdt's latest book Waiting Shelter (Victoria
University Press, 1991) begins with seven short poems in a
style familiar from her previous books This Big Face
and Moving House (Victoria University Press, 1988
and 1989). The rhythms are those of prose, and they could
be called prose poems. They are organised into short
lines, however, whose careful sequence builds in a sense
of tentativeness, but at the same time of a kind of
confidence. The tentativeness functions as an
acknowledgement and an echo of the difficulty the poet has
in translating her observations — 'the elusiveness of
objects, the shifting of scene, the instability of
perceptions and the fragility of words which permeate the
poems.' 11 The words step down the
page, however, with a confidence that is also a confiding
in the reader, in the word's literal sense of 'sharing
faith'; faith that communication, while difficult, is
always possible. A poem called 'Australia' illustrates
these ideas more literally than most:

A green man walking
means cross the road.

Dairy equals milk
bar. At the laundromat

the news is in Italian.
You recognise Foreign

Exchange andMelbourne. At the

supermarket the woman
doesn't understand

fish.Fish you sayfishfish

it gets away from
you, you wonder how

to mime such a
word.Fishyou

know, comes from the
sea. Ah.

The fish swims
happily in its

broad sea of
language.

'Waiting Shelter', the long poem which lends the book its
title, records and re-interprets the observations,
feelings, and memories experienced during a period of
transition, when the poet is waiting both for the arrival
of a loved one and for somewhere to live, for shelter.
These fragments accumulate as a series of short sentences,
which are then arranged, within sections, into three-line
stanzas; the almost incantatory rhythm set up thus is
reinforced by the repetition of words, phrases, and
constructions throughout the poem:

. . . She has a different address
no longer 'care of', but still, the need for
such care to be taken. How precious it

is. How it needs to be cared for. There
was
a house they moved in and out of but never
together. How far we have come from

closeness and how we remember it . . .

This is a highly personal poem, but the movement within
it is always outwards: from autobiography to story, from
'I' to 'she', from memories and feelings to observations.
Nevertheless, the things observed subtly become
correlatives for the poet's state of mind:

. . . On the line
bees cling to her blue shirt. Their
grip on a precarious sky.

In this way some of the poem's least overtly emotional
sections still manage to register an emotional response to
what is observed. The poem's moving final lines, which
bring the story to its (happy) ending, also reveal an
awareness of the poem's preoccupation with what 'the heart
sees':

They meet at the light of
day where the first sun
turns the clouded sky tumbled
rose, where the heart sees
plainly what the eye sees.

Bornholdt's skills of observation and translation are
equally at work — and at play — in the other three
sections of the book. Tourists Often Stop collects
hilarious scenes viewed from a window which overlooks a
park; Le Nom collects travel poems from Australia and
Europe, in which the poet's keen eye and sharp sense of
irony are exercised fully by the experience of 'overseas';
We Will We Do records the poet's search for German
ancestors. Bornholdt's writing shows that poetry can be
funny, and moving, without giving way to banality, and
without sacrificing any depth.

◊

If I want to draw any conclusions from these readings of
six New Zealand poets, they centre on the idea of
'entertaining possibilities'. All six have taken advantage
of the expansion of poetic possibilities since the 1960s;
most of them are concerned, to some extent, with possible
interpretations of experience, and the work of each has
entertained new possibilities for poetry itself — many of
which are highly entertaining. Others in New Zealand have
been doing these things too; although I've decided not to
make this essay a roll-call of New Zealand poets, you
shouldn't start marking absent anyone who isn't here.
Readers, as well as poets, are free to construct their own
traditions — their own 'New Zealand poetry'. The choices
are numerous; many are represented in this issue,
including Allen Curnow, to whom it seems fair to give the
last word (from 'A Reliable Service'):

. . . No lunch

over there either, the place
at the beach is closed. The Bay
Belle is painted bright

blue from stem to stern.
She lifts attentively. That
will be all, I suppose.

Notes

1. "The Vespiary: A Fable" is in Continuum: New and
Later Poems 1972-1988 (Auckland University Press,
1988) and in Selected Poems 1940-1989 (Penguin,
1990).

2. See Roger Horrocks's essay "The Invention of New
Zealand" in AND 1 (October 1983) pp 9-30. Another
perceptive essay by Horrocks is " 'Natural' as only you
can be": Some Readings of Contemporary NZ Poetry, in AND
4 (October 1985).

3. "A Busy Port" appeared in Sport 7 (Winter
1991).

4. "A Scrap-Book" appeared in Landfall 175
(September 1990), which also contains an interview with
Allen Curnow by Peter Simpson.

5."Breaking the Line: A View of American and New Zealand
Poetry," in Islands 38 (December 1987). Another
interesting essay by Manhire is "Dirty Silence: Impure
Sounds in New Zealand Poetry," in Dirty Silence:
Aspects of Language and Literature in New Zealand,
edited by Graham McGregor and Mark Williams (Oxford
University Press, Auckland, 1991).

6. Mark Williams, in his introduction to The Caxton
Press Anthology of New Zealand Poetry 1972-1986,
(The Caxton Press, Christchurch, 1987), p31, says of Leigh
Davis, John Newton, Elizabeth Nannestad, Gregory O'Brien
and Michele Leggott: "[They] display more variousness as
young and promising poets than common ground. We detect
trends at our own risk. As a group they show chiefly that
there has been an accumulation of possibilities during the
decade and a half since 1972 . . . "